In any emergency, the Lacd-sraad would act to safeguard profits, not rights, and for 10,000 years the profits had gone with House^Comno. The regional Svsselraads. formed by the Houses Minor m imitation of the Landsraad, performed essentially the same function in miniature with regard to individual Houses Major The third leg of die political tripod was the Spacing Guild, with its monopoly on interstellar travel and transport and thus on interstellar banking Although it owed formal allegiance to the Imperial House, from whom it received its charter, the Guild was in actual fact equal in power to both the emperor and the combined forces of the Landsraad Houses, should it choose to use that power this was acknowledged tacitly, if symbolically, by the fact that die Imperial Calendar began its reckoning with the establishment of the Guild Peace in the year 1 All communication, travel, trade, and military operations were dependent upon Guild approval. No Great House, including the formally all-powerful House Corrino, dared endanger its Guild shipping privileges through Ji-advised infringements of the Guild Peace, and the eroperor himself was forced to employ spies and smugglers in an attempt to circumvent total Guild control. Yet the Guild itself was a fundamentally conservative organization. Its conservatism was rooted in two sources; the fear that technological advances in such places as Ix or Tleilax would break its monopoly through new methods of space travel, and the fear mat its supply of melange-which alone made such travel possible-would be cut off The Guildsmcn believed, rightly for over 10,000 years, that the Impenum with its feudal structure and religious strictures against technology was its oaty safeguard against these dangers To perpetuate itself, the Guild was willing to allow rubber-stamp control over its charter by the emperor, and to balance its power against that of the Landsraad and any other threat to the established Imperial order Only on Arrakis, the sole source of melange, did the Guild's policy prove ill-founded, but that mistake was disastrous, not only for the Guild, but for the Corrino Impenum as a whole With the establishment of the Regency government in 10196, the classic period of Imperial feudalism ended, although the forms endured for many generations thereafter JT INKV1NE.